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Cruz, Musk, and Jordan Call out Biden IRS Showing up at Matt Taibbi’s Home

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Matt Taibbi has been one of the Twitter Files journalists doing a bang-up job exposing a lot of the efforts to control and influence Twitter — and thereby our speech. For his temerity in questioning the powers that be who would seek to control us, he was smeared and attacked by the Democrats when he testified before Congress about the problem. He was called a “so-called journalist,” accused of participating in “extreme MAGA lies,” and they tried to find out his sources in a shameful anti-free speech effort. But as we noted, Taibbi didn’t back down and he stood up to their lies, even continuing to call them out on Twitter after the hearing and inject some truth and reality into the equation.

But as we reported, imagine his surprise to find out that while he was testifying before Congress — saying things that Democrats were very unhappy with — someone from the Biden IRS showed up at his home. This was on the heels of the FTC demanding that Twitter turn over the names of the journalists involved in the Twitter files.

“What an amazing coincidence,” Shellenberger said.

Taibbi said that the issues appeared to concern problems with electronically filed forms, not money. In other words, things that you would deal with by mail or through their office, not something for which you would have some guy show up at your door, unannounced. Unless they were trying to be intimidating and/or trying to make some point. No weaponization of government going on there, no siree, bob.

Now, Elon Musk, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and others are calling out the “coincidence.”

Indeed, it is odd if you believe in the rule of law. Unfortunately, it’s the Biden administration and this is not unprecedented. Let’s remember back to the days of Barack Obama and Lois Lerner, and how the IRS was weaponized at that time to go after conservatives like the Tea Party people. Joe seems to have learned at the feet of Barack.

Cruz let loose on the Democrats: “This absolutely stinks to high heaven. The IRS has a troubling history of targeting the political enemies of Democrats. The IRS should NEVER be in the business of harassing the American people.” The Democrats are constantly talking about protecting “democracy,” yet doing everything they can to fly in the face of the Constitution and the rights of the American people.

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), who is also the Chair of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, wasn’t letting it go by. He sent letters to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding answers and asking to see documents or communications relating to the visit to Taibbi’s home.

This is scary stuff we’re talking about here when they’re showing up on your doorstep. Talk about chilling speech — that’s an intimidating thing to have them show up at your door, even if you know that you’ve done everything right. It’s not just about Taibbi; this chills others and is a dangerous road to go down against free speech.

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Elon Musk Lights Up Joe Biden Over His Priorities in One Brutal Tweet

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Joe Biden has made it clear that in his administration, the radical left agenda is going to trump all common sense and will take precedence over what is in the best interests of the American people.

So at a time when most people are being crushed by inflation, worried about the economy, and concerned about what’s happening with banks that have gone under, here’s what Joe Biden had to say.

“In my first year in office, we protected more lands and waters than any president since John F. Kennedy,” Biden said. “We’ve also made the largest investment to fight climate change – ever. Today, we’re building on that momentum by protecting additional natural wonders.”

“Largest investment…ever” means spending like drunken sailors for our climate agenda, masked as “inflation reduction” while the spending makes the inflation worse. That should be the number one priority for him right now. But instead, he continues to do everything to make it worse and his administration doesn’t even accept the reality that such overspending makes inflation worse.

Meanwhile, as some noted, if Biden is so concerned about protecting lands and waters, what’s happened to his response to the environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio from the train derailment and the chemicals that have affected the area and the people? His first response was that he did a “whole video” about it and “who’s zoomin’ who.” His staff then later said he was going to visit the area which he still hasn’t done.

He’s just full of it. He’s been missing, concentrating more on things like climate change and giving all our money to Ukraine. He also doesn’t seem to care much about protecting the land when it comes to protecting the border which is in such a severe crisis with a record-high influx of illegal aliens and massive amounts of fentanyl flooding across the border. Yet Biden just seems to ignore the crisis.

Biden also perhaps forgets the history of people invoking John F. Kennedy. You are no John Kennedy, sir. If Kennedy were teleported into today from 1962, he probably wouldn’t even recognize the Democratic Party. Kennedy would be considered far to the right, by today’s standards.

But Elon Musk was having none of Biden’s propaganda and let him know that he thought that his priorities were in the wrong place.

“Umm…the banks are melting,” Musk said.

Musk is right that Biden is not focusing on the right things, although I don’t know if I exactly agree that more than a few banks are “melting.” The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank was due in part to the Federal Reserve raising rates because of inflation which was in part due to Biden’s excessive spending. No wonder Biden doesn’t want to talk about that. The banks that have collapsed are a limited number, but the concern is that it could also hit other regional banks.

Bottom line? Biden needs to be called out more like this and it’s great that he’s just throwing it up in Biden’s face. Biden is just completely unconcerned about how much his actions have adversely affected the economy and the American people, and he seems intent on continuing all the bad policy and spending that led to the problems in the first place.

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Elon Musk Institutes Chef’s Kiss Auto-Response to Press Inquiries

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It of course goes without saying that Twitter CEO Elon Musk is not your conventional buttoned-up chief executive as he loves to stir things up every chance he gets in order to get people talking – and thinking.

His penchant for triggering his critics including woke celebrities, politicos and their allies press, for example, is second only to former President Donald Trump’s. Musk, like many including Trump, seems to understand that the mainstream media as it exists today is – generally speaking – agenda-driven, not towards finding out the actual facts on any given topic but instead towards shaping a pre-conceived political narrative that involves only seeking out sources who will “confirm” your supposedly blockbuster story is “true.”

A classic example of Musk setting the media’s hair on fire happened not long after his takeover became official, when he went into a Twitter Spaces Chat that was filled with angry journalists upset at some press suspensions on the popular social media platform and told them that they were “not special” when it came to following Twitter’s rules on things like posting someone’s personal information without their consent and would be treated like every other Twitter user:

Most recently, Musk proceeded to fauxfend members of the media yet again by declaring that he had set Twitter’s press email account to auto-respond to their inquiries by use of the poop emoji:

Random Twitter users tested it by sending an email, and confirmed it was true:

Use of the poop emoji has become a thing for Musk, so much so that at one point he was threatened with legal consequences over it:

Musk has previously come under fire for utilizing the emoji, notably in a 2022 lawsuit wherein Twitter cited a number of Musk’s posts – including one where he tweeted out the emoji – as proof that he had “violated his obligations” under the merger deal he signed when taking over the company.

Musk tweeted out the single emoji in May 2022, making headlines worldwide as the tweet was seen as a condemnation of CEO Parag Agrawal’s earlier statements about addressing bots on the platform.

Though there was general outrage from the usual corners after Musk made the announcement about the emoji, CBS News did have a little bit of fun with news of Musk setting the automatic reply to a poop emoji with the following headline:

Twitter’s press email is automatically “pooping” on the media

They also reported that “the change comes after Twitter’s former email for journalists with questions about the company had gone dormant for months.”

Well, at least journalists are getting a “response” from Musk now, although no doubt it’s certainly not the one any of them envisioned. 😉

Related: Purported ‘Journalist’ Asks the ‘Hard-Hitting’ Ron DeSantis Question of the Day

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Elon and Twitter Tag Team to Bust Biden in Yet Another Lie

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Joe Biden must hate that Elon Musk took over Twitter because now his lies and those of the Democrats are not going unanswered. People are allowed to respond and opponents are not getting shut down in the same way as they were before.

Now Twitter Community Notes will call out Biden to his face (well, to the face of his account) and not let him get away with some of the nonsensical claims that he has been making. It’s busted him in the past, such as on his continuing lie that Republicans are trying to push cuts in Social Security and Medicare, even though this has been debunked by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Biden was even called out for this from the floor during his State of the Union address.

Biden (or whoever is behind the account) was at it again this weekend, posting a questionable statement about how much billionaires pay in taxes.

“Look, I think you should be able to be a billionaire if you can earn it, but just pay your fair share,” Biden tweeted. “I think you ought to pay a minimum tax of 25%. It’s about basic fairness.” The tweet cited one of his quotes, “You know the average tax billionaires pay? Three percent. No billionaire should be paying a lower tax than somebody working as a schoolteacher or a firefighter.”

He thinks you should be able to be a billionaire. Well, isn’t that nice? He’s going to let you. It isn’t up to him what you make, although some leftists seem to think they should get to decide that. Then that whole “fair share” just rankles me because he keeps saying it and it’s just so factually ignorant.

According to the independent, non-profit Tax Foundation:

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data indicates that the wealthy in America are bearing the heaviest share of the income tax burden than in any time in recent memory. On the other hand, more than 53 million low- and middle-income taxpayers pay no income taxes after benefiting from record amounts of tax credits, and six out of 10 households receive more in direct government benefits than they pay in all federal taxes.

Twitter Community Notes wasn’t going to let that Biden false statement go by.

“This is incorrect,” the note said. Citing the Tax Foundation, they explained, “Avg income tax rate in 2020 was 13.6%. Top 1% of taxpayers paid a 25.99% avg rate, more than eight times higher than the 3.1% avg rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers. It increased from 20.1%/2019 to 22.2%/2020.”

Translation? It’s the reverse of what Biden is claiming, it’s the bottom half paying that 3 percent number.

What Biden said even contradicted what the White House has claimed in the past, so he doesn’t even seem to be able to keep the lies straight. The White House has previously claimed that billionaires pay an average rate of just 8 percent, by trying to jack the numbers and include in unrealized gains. They said this in a “fact” sheet they released titled “The Biden Economic Plan Is Working” in February. You know with a title like that, what’s in it can’t amount to much. They also made the 8 percent claim in 2021, claiming the “wealthiest 400 billionaire families” paid an average of “just 8.2 percent of their income — including income from their wealth that goes largely untaxed…”

“Using the existing definition of taxable income, really rich people pay an average federal income tax rate in the mid-20s,” Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center senior fellow Howard Gleckman told PolitiFact in July. “If you want to include unrealized gains in your denominator, as the White House does, the average rate would go way down.”

Elon Musk wasn’t just leaving all the debunking to the Twitter Community Notes on this one, he also had a few things to say, based on his own experience.

“I paid 53% taxes on my Tesla stock options (40% Federal & 13% state), so I must be lifting the average! I also paid more income tax than anyone ever in the history of Earth for 2021 and will do that again in 2022.”

That’s the reality. But truth doesn’t serve the Biden/Democratic purpose of grabbing as much as they can from the wealthy and they’re trying to milk hatred of the rich here. That way they think they can keep spending like drunken sailors and impose their political agenda. But there’s even a limit on what billionaires have and how much they can grab from them, so if you think that this is just aimed at billionaires, you’re missing that this is about grabbing more from all of us.

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Elon Musk: If Trump Is Indicted, It Will Backfire — Big Time

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As we reported, it looks like the Manhattan DA’s office may finally be stepping into the abyss and going for an indictment of President Donald Trump, that discussions were going on about how to deal with a possible arrest next week.

The report indicated that the Secret Service and the DA’s office were trying to work out the arrangements because the Secret Service is not going to leave him. The Secret Service would “take the lead” on such things as the decision on whether to handcuff Trump or not. You know that the Democrats are dying to perp walk Trump, and will do all they can to try to create that effect, if this indictment occurs.

Fox’s John Roberts makes the important point that the feds refused to prosecute “or even really pursue” any charges about the Stormy Daniels case, that it was a misdemeanor charge in New York, but that the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg — a Democrat — decided to elevate it to a felony charge, at the same time he’s downgrading so many other felonies. You can tell that even Roberts is questioning this, because it just screams political prosecution.

The Manhattan DA is not confirming this report about a possible indictment. As we reported, President Donald Trump has already responded to this report, saying he believes he’s going to be “arrested on Tuesday,” calling out the action as political, and urging people to protest in response.

Twitter head Elon Musk then responded with how he thought this will backfire big time and hand Trump a landslide victory.

That’s a very possible scenario, especially if they perp walk Trump before the world. Because even now, people can see this is political. If people look at all the efforts to get Trump, then they finally try to pursue this thing after years of not taking action, it screams that they’re doing it now to hurt his electoral chances now. But it’s likely to heighten the fact that he’s being unfairly targeted.

People who may have been on the line about whether to support Trump or someone else will coalesce around Trump because of the political nature of these charges. When Bragg wouldn’t go after violent criminals as much as this, it accentuates that this is all political and takes several steps further towards making us a banana republic, using power to go after political opponents.

Here’s a sample of that reaction happening already, and there were many more like this person, saying they will vote for Trump now because this would show the degree to which the Democrats are willing to go to stop him.

The funny thing is that this is also not going to stop Trump from campaigning and will likely bump up his donations.

The Democrats always overplay their hand—and it’s just possible that they’re about to do it again.

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